“Writing” Towards Writing

Yesterday somebody in a writing group I’m working with gave me flowers for helping them – so heart-warming on a cold January afternoon which was supposed to be so-called Blue Monday because of the post-Christmas dip.

That’s media-speak, of course, like Black Friday. January is endless, but we have to resist it, don’t we – not just lean into its grimness. Heartening, too, is Julie Mellor’s recent blog post, where, referencing Eric Maisel’s Fearless Creating , on ways of saying ‘yes’ to our work and not making excuses when we don’t get it done. She reminds us that, as far as writing is concerned, anything we write down, is writing, whether it is a few notes in a notebook or a complete poem.

We can get so hung up on not writing that it makes us anxious and can block us. In a recent issue of Mslexia, poet Tara Bergin says that to combat the terrible fear of starting a poem, instead of saying “You’re going to write a poem tomorrow”, she leaves post- it notes for herself that say things like, “Read such and such an article and take notes” and other notes reminding her to read different things. This means she’s always got something to do and is not failing because she isn’t compiling an actual poem. I did something like this on the long haul towards my PhD – lots of notes to self on my desk, in books and on my phone.

My insomnia is a thing I don’t necessarily like but have come to accept. so in the particularly fevered early hours of PhD days, I made it a thousand times worse by making visual Insomniascapes on my phone -tiny images of me placed in surreal landscapes, or just the landscapes themselves. These were places I knew and ran or walked around to clear my head or to think more but the various apps made them nightmarish. This was possibly a useful kind of displacement. I’ll never really know. Maybe I ought to write poems to accompany them. Even though I wasn’t writing words there but I was still “writing”. The practice was connected with certain emotional and psychological states and was undoubtedly a creative one which was linked with writing.

Here is a selection so you can see what I mean.

I’ve been listening to Radio 3’s The Essay on the new BBC Sounds app. It’s not particularly easy to navigate but if you scroll right down to nearly the start of them you’ll find the ones under the title, The Darkest Hour where writers such as Margaret Drabble, A.L.Kennedy and Michael Symmonds Roberts talk about writers, writing and insomnia.

Here are some more of my insomniac jottings in a notes app, some of which have found themselves into poems, and still may do.

And, of course, I can always open any page of this battered pocket-sized classic and find a line or two that you may have heard many times but found in this way, has a special resonance for the day, place and time you find it.

22nd January 2019 20.25

” Writing has tremendous energy. If you find a reason for it, any reason, it seems that rather than negate the act of writing, it makes you burn deeper and glow clearer on the page.” p. 191